#35 – We’ll give ALL of our money to…?

Summary

The way climate change is being communicated is very focused on the problem and very little about the solutions. We feel that there is a key piece of the puzzle that is rare being spoken of. With this episode we want to give you more hope of how you can contribute to a better environment.

Transcript

[00:00:01] This is becoming great, a podcast for people who wants to make the world a better place. Trying to pronounce ship. And the title of this episode is We’ll donate all of our money, too.

[00:00:15] Now, this might seem like a click bait title and it’s a very good reason for it. We want to get a lot of clicks now, but there’s a secondary reason and that is we got some question why does it actually mean that you will donate all of our profits?

[00:00:33] Because that’s what you say to charity. So Erik Bergman, the founder of Great.com. What does it mean that we’ve got all of our problems? Yes. To me, this is so clear.

[00:00:44] Some getting confused of the question, but it’s interesting to hear that it’s not clear because obviously it’s clear in my head, but not all. Otherwise, I’ve got it four times from different people. Yes. So I’m obviously not smart enough to realize what’s easy. Regardless, the idea we’re donating all our profits means that we will have revenues. So all the money coming in, we will have costs. We will still pay for salaries, pays for different software as we’re using, pays for consultants, whatever that is, and whatever is left after that will be donated to environmental causes. So that’s our profit. So let’s say we have a hundred thousand hundred thousand dollars coming in and we have fifty thousand dollars in costs to cover all kinds of things. Then we will donate the other fifty thousand dollars. So not all the money coming in, but everything that is left after we’ve been able to to build the organization and how much profit we’re making at this point we’re making massively and impressively zero.

[00:01:50] Yet so far not so impressive. I mean, the idea behind this of donating the profits only and not all the revenues is that we want this to be able to be around forever. And if we donated all the money coming in, someone would still need to pay for your salary. There are other PTA teams salary, the podcast software, and I could do that for a while, but I wouldn’t be able to do that for a hundred years. I would go bankrupt and we would want this project to be around for as long as possible. So that’s the idea of donating the profits and not everything else.

[00:02:28] Gotcha. And so far, most of the donations we are made have come from your pocket that you have made from your previous companies. We’re going to give a little bit of background here because we’re gonna talk about where we will focus all of our philanthropic efforts moving forward. And previously we got involved in a couple of different charities to kind of try out and get an understanding of this field of charity. And the first one we got into was a charity in Ghana, in Africa. And it was actually I had a gun involved. First, a high school friend of mine came to me and said, I have a project I want to. I’ve done a school work in Ghana, and I want to go back there and I want to teach I.T. education to children there. So I got involved at first and then I got you involved and we ended up building. Maybe you want to talk?

[00:03:27] Well, I think was really cool because I didn’t understand this concept from the beginning. One thing that really moved me with that story was when you told me that. OK, so this guy touched and he wants to run and a project for teaching kids computers in Ghana. And you told me that. Yes. So in Ghana, they have mandatory I.T. education for kids. I’m like, wow, that’s so cool. Didn’t you not expect that? And you’re like, yeah. There’s only a couple of problems. I’m like, okay, what if they don’t have computers, they don’t have Internet, then they don’t have electricity. But other than that, they have mandatory education. And yeah, Thorsten tried tried to solve it. So that was my kind of first interaction was like, okay. So there actually I remember you telling me that they’re actually learning how to use computers from books like really old books showing like this is a picture of where you go into the start menu. This is a picture of where you click. This is how you changed the font size in word in a book. And it’s like no one has to have sharing smouldering artwork up and showing the class.

[00:04:34] Yeah, it’s just one book that I was and we built a school building there and we went there to visit a couple of years ago. And that was a very powerful experience to see all of these kids being really happy, learning computers in our classroom. And for sure, that was a good experience for us. Now, when we got home, we kind of thought about things a bit deeper and we decided to change our focus a bit.

[00:05:01] And what was the reason for that?

[00:05:04] Yes, it was. I think this was actually you started questioning this as well. You know, you read the book Doing Good Better and ask me a lot of questions based on this. Like, OK, how can we know about the results that we’re making? How can we know that these kids are even going to have a better life for learning computers? Because at the end of the day, we want the kids to have a better life. It’s easy to say, yeah, they know computers. They will have a better life. But how much better life do we know? Will they actually end up spending wasting their life on social media and not actually having a better life? So that raised a lot of questions in me, like, OK, how can we create something where we can actually measure the results?

[00:05:50] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I’m personally convinced that the effect of that charity we’ve been involved in is positive. I have no doubt. Our issue is that couldn’t really measured at this point because it’s so early in the startup process. And that book you recommended, by the way, that is freaking awesome. If you want to get a base understanding of how to use your career and your money and your donations to do good, that’s a great place to start. And we’ll link to it in the description below. Doing Good Better by William MacAskill. Yeah, that’s awesome. What I Canada. The. Recommendations that he is making in the book for how to do the most good. You can read donations.

[00:06:34] So he’s doing all kinds of recommendations and they’re pretty much all about extreme poverty. So the poorest people in the world have nothing. And a lot of them are about curing various diseases that they had. One is that they don’t get enough vitamin A. And one is that they get a lot of malaria. So mosquitoes are biting them and they get sick. So one of the things ways of preventing this is giving away free mosquito nets to poor African families. So when I read this and I understood that, OK, you can actually save children’s lives very cheaply with this method mathematically. It’s like if you protect them from malaria, people will not die. And malaria is one of the biggest killers in the world. So we started donating to this cause and.

[00:07:22] My big challenge here was.

[00:07:26] I struggle to really understand what we were doing. The difference it was so hard to grasp. OK, malaria nets, are we really making a difference?

[00:07:34] How does that happen? How did you feel about this cause?

[00:07:40] Well, it’s easy for me to understand.

[00:07:47] If you are a family and your children are sleeping unprotected from mosquitoes, you would get sick. Of course, on the other hand, it’s kind of hard for me to live myself into that situation because I haven’t I don’t know anyone. I’ve gotten malaria except for Torsten, actually, the guy running this computer. I don’t know anyone that has gotten malaria. I’ve never seen it. So I don’t have a strong personal connection to it.

[00:08:12] That’s how I felt. Yeah, I’ve felt exactly the same way.

[00:08:14] Yeah. So we decided to switch focus again into the focus that we have currently right now that I feel really good about. And so what is that.

[00:08:25] Yeah. So the idea with this. Okay. How can we get something that we can connect to? What do we believe in? Where can we be passionate about making a big difference? And where do we see the biggest problem? And you ended up talking about the the environment and that course. And what you’ve read about that is like, hey, this makes sense. We only have one planet and we are abusing it. What can we focus all our interest in in changing that? And then do we want to get plastics out of the sea or do we want to plant trees? What we want to do. But it felt like we could all align and really relate to to the environment. So for me. I felt very good with that conversation. OK. If we want to focus on one thing, Malawi is a great cause and curing kids. Protecting kids is wonderful. Obviously, that’s an important thing to do. And at the same time, if we have one focus, what should that be? It shouldn’t be malaria or something else. And to me, it made sense to to focus on the environment. You said that you felt really good about this as well. How was.

[00:09:38] Well, I think the main thing is because I looked at how will the team align with us? How can we make everyone really care about the course and move in the same direction? And at least in my head, some people would care about the malaria a lot. Some people would feel so so and some people would have no connection to it. But I think that my guess now is that most people are affected by climate change and cares about it. So I think it would be easier to unite the team and also people that are around great secondary circles.

[00:10:12] Yeah. And felt the same mind or followers. Yeah.

[00:10:16] I think it makes it’s a cause that actually impacts all of us. It’s a cause. I mean personally I see that this might be a reason why we actually get extinct. Theoretically, we could destroy the earth. And I actually had no idea how big this problem was and how scary it was until we started digging into this deeper. And yet, Joel, Kim did this big presentation is your Kim is manager of a project.

[00:10:45] And yeah, when he started talking about this in front of us, that was overwhelming in many ways. How did you feel when when he did this presentation?

[00:10:59] Right. So he did a very well researched and thought through presentation where he explained the gravity of the problems and the consequences that could happen and what the science shows us. And my reaction was to. I felt like there was no hope. I felt paralyzed. Basically where I sat shut down and. And what you said now is was pretty much his conclusion with the presentation. We are fine. It’s too late. And I guess I didn’t want I even listen to it.

[00:11:40] Now, I felt the same way as so he he actually had this really good presentation with us through our material for monitor. Tricky work. And if this many temperature goes up, then this will happen. If this many temperatures go up, then this will happen. And one thing that one of the conclusions were that. OK. By 2050, there will be nowhere on the planet where we can grow coffee or chocolate anymore because those climates will be gone. And he said that Malta, where I’m living and all of Italy will be in death search within 30 years. If these things happen and it gets a cut, just depressing. And I felt that I was getting smaller and smaller in my chair, like, I don’t even want to look at this. I can’t handle this. How can we possibly change that? Why don’t we just give up?

[00:12:35] And to me, the first thing I want to change was the way we talked about it right then and there. I feel even now when we’re talking like this, I feel like this is not helpful. I feel like we should be talking about how dire the consequences should be. But there should be hope in there, like even before we started talking out. I would have liked to say we’re going to come to some kind of hope so you can do something productive about this. Otherwise, there’s no there’s no point in him speaking like you and I are doing now. And I feel very frustrated by that, that we have communication.

[00:13:06] Yeah, I see what you’re doing, and I think we talked about this in the preparations for the protocol, how can we instill hope in that’s how can we come from a place of hope? And it’s such an overwhelming challenge that it gets tricky. But that’s also what what’s changed to me when we’ve had this conversation really session of how paralyzed I got from hearing this way of communicating became like, OK. Now I understand why it’s such a big problem, because this is looking at it. It’s just overwhelmingly for me. For me, it was paralyzing. And it’s like, OK, let’s shift is where can we find hope? And when we started asking those questions, things shifted for me. Where where is the hope?

[00:13:50] And I think Joakim actually showed us that there is a quite reasonable hope because he said we are fucked. We’re doomed. We are gonna extinct ourself. But then we started digging like how much would it actually cost to solve this? And if we put it into com com if we compared it to how much of the world’s GDP would it cost to solve it? How much compared to the US military budget? Would it cost to solve it? How much of all charity donations would have to go to the climate problem to solve it? It was actually not a doomsday scenario anymore. It was very doable. It had more to do with the way redirect money and with politics than that this was a insurmountable problem that can’t be solved.

[00:14:38] Yeah, that really I really like that part of our conversation than that. I remember how big part of the U.S. military budgets are a big part of the GDP. That it wasn’t something that struck me was when when he said that if all money that goes to current charity donations in the world for one year and only one year, that would be enough to solve the climate crisis. So it’s not that much money. It’s a couple of Nostradamus and a little bit more. But that’s to me suddenly was from becoming this huge problem. That’s OK. We’re never gonna solve this. We might as well jump off a cliff. It became OK. So all we need to do is to shift some things into politics and the communication and this can actually solve. So if we focus a lot on shifting the perspective into hope and where donations are going, we can actually solve this.

[00:15:36] So what kind of solutions are we’re talking about then?

[00:15:39] It’s the most common thing that is being spoken about is limiting our own emissions. So eating meat is not good. Flying is not good. And limiting these things can create. Well, we’re not going to. Then we can do less harm ourselves, which is something that we definitely would benefit from doing. But we’re still not getting all the way there. And I think that you put this very well with that quote that you had. What was that?

[00:16:12] I said. OK, so I read a quote on Instagram two days ago and it said, Give more to the world than you take. I said, this is a beautiful quote. Unless you’re talking about carbon dioxide, then you probably don’t want to give more to the world than you take. And this is for me, when the climate crisis is as pressing editors today and it really is then. Emitting less. The problem is that you’re still emitting, right? Even though you’re emitting less. If I stop eating meat, if I stop driving, if I stop flying, I still have a carbon impact because I will use the roads. There will be hospitals running with electricity and I will still be participating in that. And the only thing that I could think of that could actually make me take more from the world than I’m giving is some kind of carbon offsetting. I cannot think. Right. Maybe tourists, but I can’t think of another way to have my life. The result of my life be less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

[00:17:23] And carbon upsetting is basically doing things outside of your own life to have an positive impact. So either planting trees or doing other things outside of your space that will make an impact instead of trying to deal with your own emissions. You’re trying to fund or help projects that are already working to take it out of there, right?

[00:17:46] Exactly. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t look at your own emissions, because that’s kind of that kind of gets carbon offsetting a bad rep. Oh, yes. I want to pay your way out of this. Now, look, do what you can. Right. Eat less meat. Fly less. If you can use recycled bags, do those things. And at the same time, I think my problem with the way we’re talking about the climate change is that we don’t mention this solution enough, because when at least I’ve been looking into it, it can be so powerful because some of the best carbon offsetting programs are doing a lot of good for little money. So this might be the biggest chance you have to actually be part of the solution. And if we don’t talk about it as a compliment to those sort of things, I think we’re really missing out.

[00:18:34] Really, I’m stuck on this. Take more than you give to me, that’s it’s a powerful way of looking at this, that the only way of actually making a large scale impact would be to one way or another support projects that take carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

[00:18:51] Isn’t that a coal coup slogan for us? Greg takes more to give.

[00:18:57] Yeah, I can think. I think it’s it’s all thumbs up. What’s what’s the general perspective of carbon offsetting? Why does this have a bad reputation?

[00:19:07] I’ve got a good example of this day to day. So I have a friend of mine. It’s really, really great guy. He’s running an Instagram account where he is. He’s inspiring people to go out to nature and do what he thinks about the most is the climate. He wants to somehow help and assist the climate crisis. And I talked about him with him about carbon offsetting. And he said, I don’t believe in carbon offsetting. And I give a pretty bad response. Corsica, I very logical towards him. So I think I made him shut down.

[00:19:41] But why wouldn’t he believe in carbon offsetting?

[00:19:44] And I think that’s the sad part, is that he heard some professor says something about tree planting. It’s not working. And that is true. I think if you go and you buy an airplane ticket and they say pay 15 dollars to neutralize your flight, how do you know that that money’s actually going somewhere where it does good? Because all of most of those incentives. Most of those programs have an incentive to make the price of offsetting sheep and the money they put into controlling if they’re actually doing good. They don’t want to spend too much on that. Right.

[00:20:21] But only because it’s better than not doing anything right. It’s more likely that it goes to carbon offsetting than that. It doesn’t.

[00:20:30] Probably, yeah. Someone’s got to control us. I mean. There’s no doubt that some of those carbon offsetting programs are doing very, very little good or maybe no good at all. It’s like with the shared field in general, but that doesn’t mean that all the ways to carbon offset aren’t working. And it doesn’t mean that a few of them aren’t doing a fantastic job.

[00:20:54] Ok, so let me see if I get this correctly. You could argue that carbon offsetting can have a bad reputation because of some organizations not really doing that much of an impact. But they still kind of charge for it in in companies. So like, OK, we advertise that we’re offsetting all carbon, but there isn’t really proof that they’re doing that. Exactly. So that kind of. And then these professors or whatever talk about those organizations and then kind of generalize into all other organizations. Yeah. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there probably organizations that are really, really good and do a big, big impact, but they kind of get a bad rep because of the other ones.

[00:21:39] Exactly. And there are so many ways as well that you could carbon offset, you could plant trees, you could play and pay for a project that sucks carbon directly out of theirs. We machines you could educate girls in Africa that has the effect that they will have smaller families and that will have a effect on the climate. You could protect Amazonas rainforest. You could support policy groups. There’s so many different things that you can do to lump all of them together. It’s like saying it’s charity, good or bad. Well, it’s hard to. Yeah.

[00:22:15] So it becomes too big to generalize. And the problem then is that that your friend, for example, he he generalized because that’s where he heard it. So he read this carbon offsetting his bad quotation marks. And then he heard, OK, it’s bad everywhere. I don’t believe in it. Exactly.

[00:22:33] So what what could you. Well, who. Who are really good at doing this? If you want to support carbon offsetting, where would you go?

[00:22:39] Well, to begin with, this is a very tricky question and we’re starting to dig into it. But to my understanding so far, it kind of depends on what risk you’re willing to take. And the organizations that might have the biggest impact also comes with quite a bit of uncertainty. And the favorite one that I’ve been looking at. Well, we have been looking at so far is called the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. A really shitty name. It’s a really shit name. Yeah. So what they do, basically, they protect the rainforest.

[00:23:19] They link to it below. So you don’t have to remember the name.

[00:23:22] Well don’t go to their Web site because you would get confused. Let’s go to great dot com slash rainforest. And we’ll have a better explanation there. But what they do. They’re are policy group in the United Nations and they fight to make sure that rainforest is more valuable to countries alive than being shot down.

[00:23:43] I like that. Can’t care. Repeat that.

[00:23:45] Ok. They are in the United Nations and they help create policies to make sure that rainforest nations and there are about 50 of them. That is a part of this for them. They have policies that makes the rainforest be more valuable alive than being shot down.

[00:24:06] Ok. So basically what they’re trying to accomplish is for for a country that has a rainforest, that they would get more financial support from other countries in the UN by keeping the rainforest than they would if they how much money they would make from shutting it down and planting crops or using it for for something that they can actually make money.

[00:24:29] Exactly. OK. That makes sense. Which is sounds very fair to me.

[00:24:36] Why, obviously, if so, there is a lot of talking about Brazil right now burning down the rainforest.

[00:24:42] And that’s a really horrible thing. What I feel missing in that debate is why are there burning down the rainforest? And for sure, to me, that probably means that, OK, they have suffering farmers that have by no means even close to the life quality that we do in Sweden. And they want to climb up the ladder of life quality. Maybe they don’t even have food. So what they do is they burn the rainforest to to use it for crops. This stuff which for the rest of the world is a very bad thing. And for them, it’s it makes sense.

[00:25:17] So what Coalition of Green First Nations is trying to do then? Okay. How can we create incentives for them not to burn down the rainforest but still get a better life?

[00:25:27] Right. Exactly. It’s complicated. It is complicated. Yes. So. There’s sort of been getting into pesto is incredible. And that is by at least I am so excited about this. These kind of organizations would facilitate them in getting so the weight and. The results have been getting. If you look at how much money they have spent with her budget and then how many tons of carbon dioxide they have prevented from being released in the atmosphere in the last couple of years, their cost to prevent one tonne is somewhere between two cents and seventy eight cents per ton. And this was math was done by the founders pledge, which are evaluating different shared organizations.

[00:26:21] Ok. And the reasons why this span is so big from two cents is 7 8 cents is that it’s hard to really say how much was this, how how big part would’ve happened either way. So if we put that 72 cents into perspective, let’s say one dollar to make it easier accounting. That’s for a long time. If you if you put that in perspective, how many tongues do you have a person in Sweden math in one year?

[00:26:48] Right. So the average reader citizen emits ten tons of carbon dioxide each year. About maybe two of them from flying. Two of them from driving, one from eating meat than those you could reduce yourself. But the rest. The last five are kind of tricky to get away from because those sort of things like you heat your house, you have hospitals, roads, stuff like that, totes.

[00:27:12] Okay. So let’s see if I understand correctly, since you emit 10 tons and this organization can mathematically prevent one ton per dollar.

[00:27:24] Meaning that if you would give them ten dollars, they would be able to prevent 10 tons. So your entire emission for one year for about 10 dollars.

[00:27:37] Well. At least that is their previous track record. And it’s like a storm you can’t know. You can’t. You can’t know what’s going to happen in the future based on previous results. Right. But let’s say the results is one tenth of that moving forward. Then you would still be able to offset a year of emissions for 100 dollars. And I think what’s cool about that is that I think reaching zero emissions for a Swedish person. No one can do that in Sweden because you need to heat your house. It’s cold. You need a hospital. You need these kind of hospital. You need those kind of things. You cannot reach a place where you take more than you give. We just by reducing your emissions by case, I think most Swedes could actually it’s a lot of money for some people, of course. I think most Swedes could spend one hundred dollars a year.

[00:28:34] To me, a hundred dollars still sounds quite high, but ten dollars sounds very reasonable. So let’s say you want to. You want to take more than you give and will gladly stick to the number of ten dollars. So if I if I donate ten dollars, I don’t I take as much as I give. With that logic, I take all of mine outside, and if I then donate twenty dollars, then I take two times as much as I give. And if I donate in my case, I have two parents and a brother. So we’re four people in my family. So if I donate forty dollars, I actually take all the carbon dioxide out of that water for my entire family for one year. And that feels very doable to actually take care and taking more than I get, right? Yeah, endurable. And there are some questions about it, but it makes a lot of sense.

[00:29:28] Yeah. Like when I run that math in my own life and I look at.

[00:29:36] Stop eating meat would be quite a big sacrifice for me. Stop flying. Same stop driving would be a huge sacrifice for me because having a car is very convenient in my life right now. This thing would be kind of tricky to do, but living on, let’s say, one hundred dollars less per year. That’s very doable compared to boost those things. So and I’m not saying like, don’t try to cut down your other things. Those are very. Everyone could really benefit the climate by doing them those things, too. But if we don’t mention this option, I think we’re missing out in the way we talk about climate change.

[00:30:17] Yeah, definitely. I see you mentioned before that you could read more about this on a great dot com slash rainforest. Is there any specific information there that I didn’t share? Now you want to bring up or just recommend people to go there and read?

[00:30:35] Well, one thing we’re gonna poster yes, did an interview with a gentleman called John Halstead that has done the work that’s already complicated interview.

[00:30:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you have experience spirit honk if you’re a nerdy person.

[00:30:52] That is information that it’s not in this podcast, but I think it covered the basics here.

[00:30:57] Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s complicated. OK, great. So let’s wrap this up then.

[00:31:03] So I have one more question. So how would you like from great to communicate about the climate? Because one of the things we want to do is we want to make money and we want to donate it. Another thing we want to do is we want to influence people to become better entrepreneurs and also people that can contribute to a better world. Now, how would you like for us to communicate about the climate to inspire people in a positive way?

[00:31:28] I think I like the way that we’ve done it in this podcast, but probably given probably start with giving some hope, explaining how big the problem is and giving more hope. I think that would be a good method. And what we missed here was that we didn’t give hope in the beginning. We built a paralyzing problem and then we in my mind, we gave quite a lot of hope. So I think that probably an 80 20 split on 80 percent hope 20 percent. This is how big the problem is. While when I hear about this or when when I see this, most of the time I hear it, it’s 95 percent. We’re doomed. Five percent hope. So I’d like to see that shift talking about. I mean, when I hear all the donations in the world in one year could solve this. To me, this house. Hey, easy peasy. When I hear, yeah, we don’t even need more than, I don’t know, a fifth of the U.S. military body or all of the military use youth bodies, whatever in one year, hey, we can still solve this. We’re not doomed, but we need to act.

[00:32:32] Right. Something I can see it’s missing from the conversation we have now. It’s an easy call to action to expedite the process of to make it easier to be a part of the solution. Because it kind of became complicated way we talk now. So to have something that makes it easier to.

[00:32:52] Ok, so I’ll make it. I’ll make it super easy. Yeah. In the link on this podcast episode, you can go. We’ll have a link to Coalition for Rainforest Nations donation page. So just go to that page if you want to donate money. Don’t read a lot about the organization because it’s so complicated and overwhelming. If you trust in us, then this is this is at least how we’re doing. We’ve spoken to experts. We’ve done the research ourself, kind of. And this is by far our best understanding that this is a good cause. So go to that page and donate twenty dollars and you’ll actually take more out of the atmosphere than you getting as in as clear as a call to action as I can possibly get.

[00:33:37] I like that. I like that.

[00:33:39] Create another. Wrap it up, then. Yes. So we are doing this podcast because we believe that entrepreneurship is one way of making the world a better place. Personally, I believe it’s the best way because I think it’s the best way for me to influence. But it’s one way of making the world a better place. And we want to create a community of people that think that and feel that I want to be a part of that. People who want to learn how to build a company that can make the world a better place, but also be a part of that. And something that I struggle with and I want to get better at is asking for help. Whenever I’m asking for help, I feel needy and pushy and like I’m trying to take something, but I want to get better at asking for help. So how could someone help us?

[00:34:31] Well, I think one awesome thing is if you if you liked these ideas, if you thought that this gave you value for change, a perspective, if it helps you on your entrepreneurial journey, please share this to someone that where you think this could add value to their life.

[00:34:48] Could you think of one person that has the mindset? So this would be valuable to them.

[00:34:55] Share just that person that would really help. So please, please do that and we’ll build this community together. Way. All right. Have fun. I had fun. Have a good day, my friend. You too, brother.